A SISSA research study published in a special issue of the journal Brain and Cognition, completely dedicated to the cognitive neuroscience of food, analyzes the lexical-semantic deficits of the food category in patients suffering ...

A new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reports a link between reduced functional activation and reduced cortical thickness in the brains of patients ...

A new research paper, by Chen et al in Cognitive Neuroscience, studied the connections between the executive control and reward systems in the brain, and discovered the ability to self-regulate a healthy body weight may be ...

Anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric conditions affecting children and adolescents. While antidepressants are frequently used to treat youth with anxiety disorders, sometimes, antidepressants may be poorly ...

A new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging reports a neural signature of emotional adaptation that could help researchers understand how the brain adapts to childhood adversity and predict ...

Adolescents focus on rewards and are less able to learn to avoid punishment or consider the consequences of alternative actions, finds a new UCL-led study.The study, published in PLOS Computational Biology, compared how adolescents ...

Utilizing information from all the senses is critical for building a robust and rich representation of our surroundings. Given the wealth of multisensory information constantly bombarding us, however, how does our brain know ...

During and after chemotherapy, many cancer patients describe feeling a mental fog, a condition that has been dubbed "chemo brain." Why this happens is unclear, but researchers have found a new clue to understanding this syndrome. ...

Bad experiences can cause people to strongly remember the negative content itself but only weakly remember the surrounding context, and a new UCL study funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust has revealed ...

Evidence of grid cell activity has been seen in healthy volunteers asked to imagine moving through an environment in new UCL (University College London) research funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust.

Cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes and their behavioral manifestations. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the neural circuitry. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both psychology and neuroscience, unifying and overlapping with several sub-disciplines such as cognitive psychology, psychobiology and neurobiology. Before the advent of fMRI, cognitive neuroscience was called cognitive psychophysiology. Cognitive neuroscientists have a background in experimental psychology or neurobiology, but may spring from disciplines such as psychiatry, neurology, physics, linguistics, philosophy and mathematics.

Methods employed in cognitive neuroscience include experimental paradigms from psychophysics and cognitive psychology, functional neuroimaging, electrophysiological studies of neural systems and, increasingly, cognitive genomics and behavioral genetics. Clinical studies of patients with cognitive deficits constitute an important aspect of cognitive neuroscience. The main theoretical approaches are computational neuroscience and the more traditional, descriptive cognitive psychology theories such as psychometrics.